When they finally gathered at Maggie’s front door and stood shoulder to shoulder, Phoebe rang the bell. Lucy was glad she was not alone. It would have been a simple matter for Maggie just to talk to her through a crack in the door, claiming she was still just too tired to see anyone, though she appreciated Lucy’s concern. Lucy knew she wouldn’t have been persuasive or pushy enough to force her way in.
But it was pretty darned near impossible for Maggie to face down all four of her stalwart friends at once. It reminded Lucy of her days on the high school soccer team, when the opponent was taking a corner kick at the goal and the coach would shout, “Make the wall! Make the wall!”
They were making the wall, and Maggie might give it her best shot, but she would not get the ball past their loyalty and deep concern.
They heard the bell ring inside and a few moments later, they saw Maggie peek out the living room curtain. They waited. But she didn’t come to open the door.
“What if she doesn’t answer?” Phoebe whispered.
“She’s got to answer,” Lucy said.
“Not necessarily. She didn’t ask us to come here. She specifically told us not to. She has a perfect right not to let us in,” Dana reminded them.
“If she doesn’t answer, you’re all taking bagels,” Suzanne mumbled.
Finally the door opened. Maggie looked pale and flustered. Her hand clung to the open top of her long cardigan sweater. She wore a T-shirt and velour sweatpants, but was barefoot, which led Lucy to suspect Maggie had still been in her bathrobe when she heard the bell and had run upstairs to quickly pull some clothes on.
“Oh…this is very sweet. But I’m really not up for company right now,” Maggie said quietly.
“We aren’t company, Maggie. We’re your best friends,” Dana replied in an even quiet tone.
“Your homegirls? Your posse?” Lucy offered, trying to interject a light note.
“We’re a flippin’ intervention, Maggie. You don’t have a choice.” Phoebe’s high thin voice was stern.
Maggie turned to her, looking surprised. But she hardly budged or opened the door any wider. “Do you really want to socialize with a murder suspect? Word gets around. You might regret it. Bad for business, I’ll tell you that much.”
It was hard for Lucy to tell if Maggie was joking. She sounded so serious. And sad.
“If you don’t let us in this instant, you’ll definitely regret it. That much I can say for sure.” Suzanne leaned forward and nudged the door open with her shoulder, like a linebacker heading for the end zone, the bag of bagels tucked under her arm.
Once she’d clear the way, Maggie had no choice but to step aside.
“Please come in. Nice of you to drop by…” she said as they traipsed past her into the foyer.
They filed into the living room, then chose places to sit. Lucy and Dana sat on the camelback chintz sofa. Phoebe sat in a wingback chair. Suzanne pulled over the rocker from its spot near the fireplace.
“You sit down here, Maggie. I’ll make some coffee.”
“There’s a full pot. Hardly touched it,” Maggie murmured.
They all sat looking at her, waiting for her to speak. Lucy thought Maggie looked lost in her private thoughts, hardly aware they were even in the room.
“Maggie…tell us what you are thinking,” Dana coaxed her. “We want to help.”
“Yes, we want to help,” Lucy repeated. She sat forward, waiting for Maggie to reply.
“I’m ruined. What else could I be thinking?” Maggie’s voice trembled. “Who will come to the store now? Especially after that awful article in the newspaper. Everyone is talking about me. I’m sure of it.” She looked down at her hands twisting in her lap. Lucy could rarely remember seeing her sit in that chair without some knitting in her hands.
“But you’re innocent, Maggie,” Dana reminded her. “It doesn’t matter what other people think. In time, they’ll see that they were wrong.”
“In time, of course. But I don’t have that much time. A little shop like the Black Sheep can go out of business quickly. And I didn’t look innocent when I was dragged off by the police Tuesday night. Did you see the crowd on the sidewalk? Oh…it was awful. I’ve never been through anything like it. Not even when Bill died,” she added. She took a deep breath and composed herself. “No, I can’t survive this. The shop…everything I’ve worked so hard to build there…it’s all been taken away from me. Like that.” She snapped her fingers in the air. “I guess Amanda Goran has had her revenge on me after all, hasn’t she?” she asked bitterly.
“Maggie, you can’t be serious,” Lucy implored her.
“We know you feel terrible, Maggie. Anybody would,” Dana said quietly. “Violated and accused of something horrific that you didn’t do. But give yourself some time. Don’t make any big decisions right now. You aren’t thinking clearly.”
“Oh, yes I am. I might as well just close up shop. Quick and painless. Instead of sitting there every day, hemorrhaging money. Waiting for customers who never come. Waiting for the police to come back and take me away for good this time.”
Her last line shut them all up, Lucy noticed. For a long moment, nobody even dared to breathe.
Dana was the first to find her voice. “This is not like you, Maggie. You know people will still come to the shop. The police will find the person who killed Amanda and everyone will forget that you were ever involved.”
“People have, like, very short attention spans, know what I mean?” Phoebe said. “They’re talking about this now, then next week, it’s something else. Global warming…bad tomatoes.”
Maggie glanced at her but didn’t say anything. She pulled an afghan around her shoulders and curled into the chair, staring into space again.
Lucy understood now. In that last gesture, Maggie was trying to tell them that she didn’t feel safe in the Black Sheep anymore. She felt vulnerable, exposed. Under attack by the small-town gossip she was sure had already begun. And that was the saddest thought of all.
“Maybe you should close for just a week or so, see how that goes,” Dana suggested gently. “Just until the police tie up this case and it all blows over.”
Dana glanced at the others, silently soliciting support. Lucy thought that was a good compromise. She did think Maggie was acting rashly. Maybe closing for a few weeks would be the best thing, considering Maggie’s frame of mind. No use trying to force her to go back if she really didn’t want to.
But closing the Black Sheep, even for a little while, would be a great loss to all of them. Lucy didn’t even want to think about the doors shutting forever. But if that’s what Maggie needed, how could they argue?
Suzanne bustled back in with a tray that held cups, the coffeepot, cream cheese, and a stack of bagels on a platter.
“That idea sucks,” she said bluntly. She set down the tray and turned to Maggie. “If you close the shop, even for the rest of the week, that’s like hanging out a big banner that says, ‘Hey Everybody. You’re Right. I Did It!’ Are you going to let them take it all away from you? Are you going to let Amanda win, from beyond the grave, for Christmas sake?”
Maggie stared up at her, a curious light in her eye, her mouth hanging open.
Lucy couldn’t tell if Suzanne’s outburst had made her angry. It had definitely caught her attention.
“Oh, easy for you to say. Try sitting in an interrogation room for three hours. And being fingerprinted like a common crook….” She held her hands out, spreading her fingers. “See? I still can’t get all the ink off. It’s horrible…then tell me that I’m giving in too easily.”
“I’ll tell you that I’m disappointed in you,” Suzanne continued. Dana turned to look at her, shaking her head, trying to signal she was going too far. Suzanne ignored her.
“I never expected you to turn tail and run like this, Maggie,” Suzanne continued. “I always thought you were a fighter. You always said you didn’t care if people gossiped about you. You didn’t care what they said. Why start now?”
Maggie squared her shoulders. Her mouth twisted but she didn’t say anything. Lucy felt a glimmer of hope that Suzanne’s tough love approach was working.
“Why start now…Suzanne has a point,” Dana jumped in.
“Hey, the way we all hang out there all the time, the place always looks crowded. No one’s going to think you lost business,” Phoebe pointed out. She reached over for a cup of coffee and a cinnamon-raisin bagel.
“We’re your best customers,” Suzanne reminded her. “And we’re not going anyplace.”
“We certainly buy enough yarn every month to cover the rent,” Dana added in a lighter tone.
“And probably the utilities, too.” Lucy glanced at Maggie. Her rigid expression was relaxing a bit, wasn’t it?
“Not with the discounts I give you, ladies…and all the freebies I hand over.”
“Exactly. That’s why we can’t let you close. We need that free yarn,” Phoebe told her. “Hey, I’ve got it. If Maggie gives up the shop, we take over. Is that brilliant, or what? I can’t put up any cash right now, but you’ll get my management experience. I totally know how to run the place.”
Maggie made a snorting sound. “You do not.”
Dana laughed. “Brilliant…I think we should do it. What do you say, Maggie? Is the Black Sheep up for grabs?”
Maggie turned her head to the side. She sighed. “No…it is not.”
She didn’t say anything more. Everyone waited.
Lucy wondered if she was angry and didn’t appreciate being cajoled out of her black mood. Maybe she thought they weren’t taking her crisis seriously enough?
“I will tell you all that if you need any yarn, the shop will be open tomorrow, the usual hours,” she said slowly. “Suzanne, you’re wasting time with real estate. You ought to get a job for Detective Walsh. In the interrogation room. But you’re right. No use acting as if I have something to hide when I don’t. No use letting people who want to believe the worst about me win. That really isn’t my style.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear.” Suzanne picked up a bagel and slathered it with cream cheese.
The bagels look good but Lucy stuck to her coffee. She’d skipped breakfast in her rush to get over here but was trying to watch her carbs. She had to lose ten pounds by the weekend. Just in case she ended up going out with Matt.
Dana sighed. “Now that we settled that problem, can you tell us about last night?”
Maggie shrugged. “There’s not too much to tell. There was a lot of waiting. Like a horrible long layover in an airport except much more agonizing. That’s how they try to wear you down. Get you on edge. Walsh asked me the questions along with Detective Reyes and another detective. Gardener, I think his name was. They must have asked a million times if I’d ever seen that hat block before, how it got into the shop. They made me tell them all over again about my relationship with Amanda. Everything I’d told them that first time.”
“But you must have told them that the block came in the boxes from the Knitting Nest, right?” Lucy asked eagerly.
“Oh, I did. About a thousand times. I also told Walsh and Reyes I hadn’t seen it at the Knitting Nest when we looked through the shop that first time. And I really didn’t remember if it had been in the boxes of yarn Peter brought over from his house. It might have been there…” She looked at Lucy. “You went through those boxes on Monday. Did you see it?”
Was that only two mornings ago? It seems like ages ago now.
“I didn’t,” Lucy told her. “But I didn’t look in all the boxes. Mainly the ones in the storeroom.”
“They didn’t find it in the storeroom. They found it out in the front room. At the bottom of a carton. Someone called Walsh and said the murder weapon was in my shop. So they ran right over. Can you believe that?” Maggie shook her head, her eyes bright. She was angry. “It had to be Peter Goran. But it’s so transparent, it’s practically unbelievable anyone would try a move that lame.”
“I’m sure the police are questioning him again today,” Dana said. “I wonder if they’ll get anywhere, though. If they can’t tie him to the block in some way, either, we’re just going around in circles.”
“For goodness sakes. Let’s wake up and smell the coffee. He was trying to frame Maggie,” Suzanne insisted. “In a village idiot way, I agree. But what else could it be?”
Lucy almost agreed with her, but it did seem too simple, even for Peter.
“Well…we know Peter showed Maggie the inventory of the store and he acted as if she was the only one he’d asked to look at it. But he could have been lying to her. There could have been people in and out of the Knitting Nest last week for a lot of reasons, and one of them could have found out you were taking the stock and planted the hat block.”
“Possibly. Except that Phoebe and I packed the first set of boxes ourselves. Then we carried them out to his truck. He was the only other person who touched them. But he did bring part of the other load from his house,” Maggie added. “My attorney raised that point with Walsh, as well. It didn’t have to be Peter,” she conceded, “though he seems the most likely. It does seems too obvious, even for him.”
Dana took a sip of her coffee and shook her head. “I keep getting this feeling we’re missing something. It’s right in front of us but we don’t see it.”
“Me, too. Like trying to find a dropped stitch. Sometimes you see the hole…but you can’t figure out how it got there.” Phoebe sighed and turned to Maggie. “We missed you last night, Maggie. We kept messing up our projects and we didn’t have anyone to fix them for us.”
“You were knitting while you waited to hear about me?”
Suzanne smiled. “Of course we were. What else would we do?”
“I guess that makes sense. I don’t know why…it just really gets me.” She sniffed and blew her nose in a tissue. She’d been under so much pressure, she was just very emotional right now, Lucy realized.
“Well…tomorrow is Thursday…already,” Maggie reminded them. “We’re still having knitting night, right?. Bring your messes to me then,” she told them.
“Where are we meeting? I forgot.” Suzanne’s BlackBerry started to buzz. She pulled it out of her purse to check the message.
“At the shop. It’s my turn,” Phoebe said. Phoebe’s apartment was too small to host the group so when her turn came around, they met at the Black Sheep. “I have a real treat planned for you guys. I’m going to show you how to hand-dye with Jell-O. Is that cool or what?”